Economic changes are produced by the internal dynamics of civilian society. They are carried out by the decisions freely made by millions of entrepreneurial and hard-working citizens who spontaneously determine the speed and direction in which the country should move. They do so in laboratories, factories, companies and universities. The true creators of change are the researchers, scientists, great engineers, creative managers, and shrewd entrepreneurs – the thinkers who in every educational center daily remodel our knowledge. The social changes are propelled (or held back) by the communications media, churches, non-government organizations, labor unions, student organizations and the various interest groups.

In the face of those uncontrollable, absolutely unpredictable dynamics, politicians can only manage and set rules. If the rules are correct, they benefit the whole of society, impede abuses, prevent flagrant injustice, and facilitate the introduction of changes. If they are wrong, the consequences can be totally negative and in effect become ballast. But it is not up to the politicians to change the destiny of their people because, among other reasons, in free societies no one knows in which direction the population must move. That monstrous certainty can be found only in socialist dictatorships endowed with a single head, where the great artificers of social engineering -- using as a transmission belt certain groups of obscure functionaries, generally preceded by some enlightened fanatics -- think they know the route society must take and herd the people in that direction by dint of whip and calaboose, stifling on the way the entrepreneurial spirit, while they root out all vestiges of genuine creativity.

The mere existence of a phenomenon like Obama proves that assertion. It was the tenacious struggle of the Quakers and the abolitionists in the 19th Century, taken up by Martin Luther King Jr. in the mid-20th Century, that later generated Lyndon Johnson's integrationist legislation, which today happily permits Obama to be a viable option for American voters. What changes the United States is the train, the telephone, aviation, the contraceptive pill, the computers and cloning -- among hundreds of other innovations -- and all those technological milestones rise in the bosom of civilian society and push the country in a theretofore unsuspected direction, provoking tremendous consequences at all levels of coexistence, a situation to which the politicians must react. That is the virtue of the so-called open societies, where the State neither directs nor plans but restricts itself to regulate in an equitable manner. From this spontaneous order is born the immense fortitude and incredible capacity to generate wealth of a nation like the United States.

But there is another paradox. Sometimes, the great changes -- even though beneficial -- create serious problems that the politicians must confront. A typical instance is the development of pharmacology and the extremely expensive diagnostic devices. Thanks to them, people today live longer -- the true change is an increase in longevity -- but those final years are terribly onerous and nobody knows how to deal with them, because almost every sick person wishes to prolong his or her life at any cost. The function of the politician, therefore, is to find a way to regulate this change in the most reasonable and efficient way possible, within the limitations that a budget always imposes. And the job of the voter, of course, is to try to identify which politician can better accomplish that and similar other tasks. It's not easy.